What MIDI really got right is flexibility with regard to timbre. The standard was so open that General MIDI only came along later to establish some consistency for timbres.
The context in which I was writing was the previous comments, not your experience.
Maybe I wasn't clear when I said "you can use MTS" and "support seems widespread".
It's not part of the base MIDI standard, but it is standardized.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_tuning_standard
MTS is how you specify how MIDI notes are translated to frequencies, if you desire. You can use it to specify alternative scales, if you desire. The Wikipedia list of hardware and software which supports MTS seems very conservative IMO... my personal experience is that MTS support is reasonably common.
That’s what I said and what I meant. The Venn diagram of disagreement with me congrues with the Venn diagram of self disagreement.
Maybe there's a market in retrofitting old synthesizers like the kits available for some pre-MIDI classics ;)
It was designed by a large industrial committee, in secret, with no transparency and no input from other interested parties. The opposite of MIDI 1.0. And it just stinks of it. It is overwrought by a long shot, with many bells and whistles nobody is asking for (there's a very specific, and frankly short, list of critical MIDI failings). It has no reference examples and will be awful to implement and to deploy over various transports. When it came out it went over like a lead balloon: nobody seems to want to implement it.
Yeah but MIDI works for so much more than a piano. People use MIDI to program drum VSTs, guitar VSTs, entire orchestras, guzheng VSTs... basically anything musical.
That being said, it's serviceable but not great for a lot of these things, because originally it was meant just for keyboard-controlled synthesizers. The biggest flaw (IMO) is lack of standardization for individual instruments with more varied playing styles and articulations than the piano. As a basic example, for guitar VSTs, if you want to switch between sustain notes and palm mutes, you generally have to play an out-of-range note (a "keyswitch") to alter the articulation. However this keyswitch is different for Ample Sound, Shreddage, Native Instruments guitar libraries, etc. Similarly if you want to slide between notes, some VSTs just let you overlap the note while others make you use a slide keyswitch. Every VST has its own way of MIDI programming that isn't transferrable.
It's like switching between programming languages, except you're building a single program where it uses multiple languages at once in the same file and you have to remember if the current language syntax you're writing uses `elif`, `else if` or is LISP. (I have reference manuals for most VSTs I own bookmarked for this reason.)
The fact that MIDI continues to be used today is, more than anything, the result of "perfect is the enemy of done" IMO. You could redesign something better than MIDI from the ground up, but since everything already supports MIDI there's little motivation when it already works well enough.